Juan Cole

A car bomb at a livestock market in Babi province near the city of Hilla . The blast left 12 dead. Babil is majority Shiite but has a Sunni minority. Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani met Thursday in Najaf with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Sistani is said to have expressed […]

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton slammed Israel on Wednesday for its plan to demolish 88 Palestinian homes in Occupied East Jerusalem, calling it a violation of the Roadmap for Israeli-Palestinian peace. She said after meeting Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, “Clearly this kind of activity is unhelpful and not in keeping with the obligations entered into […]

Guerrillas in the northern city of Mosul on Tuesday subjected a US military base to a barrage of mortar fire, killing a US soldier. The guerrillas successfully targeted a mililtary counter-insurgency office intended to deal with the guerrillas. That move shows that they have infiltrated the base and have someone on the inside telling them […]

Shorter AFP: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will try to tell Binyamin Netanyahu, the far rightwing prospective prime minister of Israel, that he should allow the rebuilding of Gaza and start up a peace process that leads to a Palestinian State. Netanyahu ask her to let him bomb Iran and go on colonizing the West […]

Anand Gopal reports for CSM that many Afghans, especially in the Pushtun south, oppose President Obama’s plan to send more US troops to Afghanistan. Highlights: ‘ Parliamentarian Shukria Barakzai says she has an innovative amendment to Washington’s planned injection of up to 30,000 new troops here. “Send us 30,000 scholars instead. Or 30,000 engineers. But […]

My column is out in Salon.com, We’re really leaving Iraq: Some Iraq war critics are fretting about Obama’s speech on Friday, and his plan to stay a little longer. But here’s why there’s no reason for alarm. Excerpt: ‘In particular, Obama’s plan to leave 35,000 to 50,000 support troops in Iraq between August 31, 2010 […]

Someone is not a team player. Screenshot from google.news, 3/1/09 4 pm ET: cf: “Iran Nuclear Program Hyped Again” and “IAEA Inspectors: Iran not Producing Weapons-grade Uranium.” End/ (Not Continued)

You wonder if the last front page article in the last newspaper will be about the demise of the newspaper? I especially regret the possibility that the San Francisco Chronicle might close, or become part of a single-owner print media monopoly in the Bay area. The Chronicle has been one of the papers I have […]

President Obama said on Friday that the US has no long-term goal of keeping US troops in Afghanistan. (See below). In contrast to Obama’s pronouncements on getting out of Iraq, he has not announced a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. (The full text of Obama’s remarks on the withdrawal from Iraq is here.) Meanwhile, the […]